George Monbiot probably burst a blood vessel when he read this. Congratulations to Piers, who doesn’t need a teraflop class supercomputer to render a forecast. This passage tells the story:

I have not a clue whether his methods are sound or not. But when so many of his forecasts seem to come true, and when he seems to be so consistently ahead of the Met Office, I feel I want to know more.

Much of the data cited to support warmist claims is pure conjecture, says Christopher Booker

We have lately heard much of the claim that 2010 will turn out to have been “the hottest year on record”. No one has done more to promote this belief than Dr James Hansen, head of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), responsible for one of the four main official global temperature records.

As reported by the US blogs Real Science and Watts Up With That, in a post headed “GISS temperatures out of line with the rest of the world”, the GISS record has in recent months been diverging wildly from the others. While three have shown global temperatures dropping sharply, by as much as 0.3C, the GISS figures (based, despite the link to Nasa, on surface temperatures) have shot up by 0.2C.

In a second post (“Hansen’s ‘Hottest Year Ever’ is primarily based on fabricated data”), Real Science demonstrates that the parts of the world which GISS shows to be heating up the most are so short of weather stations that only 25 per cent of the figures are based on actual temperature readings. The rest are simply conjectured by GISS. This is not the first time Dr Hansen’s temperature record has come under expert fire. Three years ago, GISS was forced to revise many of its figures when it was shown that wholesale “adjustments” had been made, revising older temperatures downwards and post-2000 figures upwards.

The outcome of the U.N.’s climate meeting in Cancún meeting was what we expected. Media reports describe it as “A near-consensus decision” but these happy reports don’t explain that the agreement was “a near-consensus decision” to not make any difficult decisions yet.

The conference did not reach agreement on a target date for the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions, there is no guarantee that the countries will honor their pledges to reduce emissions or improve efficiency, and no detail how a “green fund” will be created to help developing countries, not how the money will be spent.

The conference also did not agree on what to do about the expiring Kyoto Protocol. Set to expire in 2011, there is no replacement for Kyoto. Adding insult to lack of action, Japan itself has flatly stated that it will not agree to a second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol. Other nations will follow suit.